Nationally sought man guilty of Topsail land-sale fraud

A man district attorneys call a serial perpetrator of fraud pleaded guilty Thursday in Pender County Court to selling two plots of land on Topsail Island that never belonged to him.

Adam Wagner - Wilmington StarNews

A man district attorneys call a serial perpetrator of fraud pleaded guilty Thursday in Pender County Court to selling two plots of land on Topsail Island that never belonged to him.

Roger Glenn Kornegay, 55, pleaded guilty to two counts of obtaining property by false pretenses in excess of $100,000 and five counts of forger of a deed. Kornegay was sentenced to from five years and seven months to six and a half years in prison. He also was ordered to pay $392,000 in restitution.

Kornegay is in the midst of a sentence in federal prison for possession of counterfeit commercial checks and is wanted in several jurisdictions for felonies related to financial card fraud and thefts. In a release, District Attorney Ben David’s office listed 11 other identities Kornegay assumed.

“Mr. Kornegay engaged in fraud across the state and indeed across the country, and the end of the road was in Pender County,” said David, district attorney for Pender and New Hanover counties. “He changed his identity, preyed on people who lost sometimes their life savings, and for the next decade he’ll have to pay for his crimes in a prison cell.”

In 2010, Kornegay traveled to Pender and Onslow Counties under the identity of John Worley, an employee of the University of Mississippi. He stole Worley’s ID by picking a lock at the university’s gym and taking his wallet.

Kornegay forged deeds for three unrelated oceanfront or ocean-view lots in Topsail and North Topsail Beach as Worley. He used three different attorneys in Pender and Onslow counties, telling them the deeds were for inter-family, in-kind swaps and no cash would be changing hands.

In February 2010, he had the deeds recorded, and he began to advertise the lots for sale in June 2010. Each lot was listed at less than retail value, as Kornegay claimed he needed the money quickly for prostate cancer treatment.

A Pender County lot was sold for $250,000, and an Onslow County lot was sold for $135,000. The money was quickly removed from a Durham bank account in large cash withdrawals and cashier’s checks, said Joe Bowman, a Pender County assistant district attorney.

Kornegay was found out when a real estate agent called the owner of one of the plots to say he’d been interested in it for a while and wanted to know why he hadn’t had a chance to bid.

Kornegay was caught after investigators found a Match.com online dating site profile listed under his brother’s name that had been bought using a gift card purchased with a stolen credit card in Mississippi, Bowman said.

Detectives contacted Kornegay’s brother who said he didn’t have a Match.com profile, but did have a brother who had stolen his identity several times in the past.

Bowman said Kornegay’s first conviction for fraud was in Oklahoma in 1986 for stolen tractors.

By pleading guilty in Pender County, Kornegay prevented a trial that a release from the district attornehy’s office said could have lasted three to four weeks and involved more than 50 witnesses, including some from out of state.

The release said the trial “would have easily run into tens of thousands of dollars.”